On the afternoon of July 23, 1846, William H. Seward rose to give his closing argument in a local murder case. Recently returned from Albany, where he had spent two terms as governor of New York, he had resumed his law practice in Auburn, a hundred and seventy miles west. He was defending a twenty-three-year-old black man who had confessed to killing a white family of four. A mob had come close to lynching the defendant, and Seward was warned that, as the defense counsel, he could face retaliation. “There is a busy war around me, to drive me from defending and securing a fair trial for the negro Freeman,” Seward wrote to his closest adviser, Thurlow Weed. At sixteen, William Freeman had been wrongly charged with horse stealing and sent to Auburn Prison, where he was beaten with a wooden board until his skull cracked and he lost his hearing. Seward told Weed that Freeman “is deaf, deserted, ignorant, and his conduct is unexplainable on any principle of sanity. It is natural that he trusts me to defend him.” Weed urged Seward against it, but Seward’s wife, Frances, commended his decision, and assisted him in his research on the insanity defense, a novel legal tactic at the time.
Seward told the jurors that he was appalled, as they were, by the massacre of “a whole family, just, gentle, and pure,” but he argued that Freeman, who was clearly unstable after having been brutalized himself, was “still your brother, and mine, and bears equally with us the proudest inheritance of our race—the image of our Maker.” The jury was unmoved, and the judge sentenced Freeman to hang. Yet newspapers across the country printed Seward’s courtroom arguments, and they were applauded by a progressive constituency throughout the North. The case helped re-launch his career in politics, a line of work that he described in his memoir as “the important and engrossing business of the country.” He went on to become, as Walter Stahr shows in his masterly new biography, “Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man” (Simon & Schuster), one of the most influential and polarizing American politicians of the nineteenth century.
William Henry Seward, known as Henry, grew up in rural New York, in a slave-owning family, although his parents, alone among their neighbors, allowed the slaves’ children to go to school, and, Seward recalled, they “never uttered an expression that could tend to make me think that the negro was inferior to the white person.” In 1820, when Seward graduated from Union College, in Schenectady, the students were inflamed by the Missouri Compromise, which allowed slavery in Western territories south of the Missouri line. Seward gave a commencement address, with Southern graduates on one side of the dais and Northerners on the other, in which he introduced an argument that he developed during the next forty years: the North and the South should agree to pursue the “gradual emancipation” of slaves.
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